Boys Town Offers Much-but Not Family

December 25, 1994|By Mike Dorning, Tribune Staff Writer. and Mike Dorning is a member of the Tribune's New York bureau.

BOYS TOWN, Neb. — As dusk darkens a wintry Nebraska day and holiday decorations brighten the tree-lined streets, this community of solid brick houses takes on the look of a picture-perfect Christmas in the Heartland.

Glowing plastic snowmen, blinking Christmas lights and rows of incandescent candy canes illuminate the yards. And boys in bright parkas and woolly mittens are out clearing snow from the sidewalks.

From one of the houses, a man emerges to pluck the evening paper from the walk and to call to dinner one of the shovelers, Patrick, a tall, lanky teen with red hair and a freckled face.

"It's pretty, isn't it?" Patrick says. "It's better than where I lived before. I couldn't live there. My Mom was always getting in trouble with the police."

Patrick doesn't live with his mother anymore. And despite the familial feel, the man calling him isn't his father. Patrick lives in Boys Town, what we used to call an orphanage.

Incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich was right to hold up Boys Town as a model. Among orphanages, this is as good as it gets.

Age 9 to 19, the 330 boys and 209 girls (girls have been admitted since 1979) living in this famous children's home in the suburbs of Omaha are among the privileged of institutionalized youths. The $225,000 russet brick houses for eight, the family vans in the garages and the rest of the impressive facilities are possible only because of private donations; government payments to support the youths contribute only 29 percent of the cost.

The half-billion-dollar endowment Boys Town has accrued over the years makes it richer than all but 30 American colleges, better financed than such well-heeled schools as Wellesley, Smith and Swarthmore.

Yet despite the idyllic setting and the patient house parents, there is loneliness at Boys Town.

A recent school assignment was to describe how Santa met his wife. One 14-year-old girl imagined Jolly Old St. Nick as a man "alone . . . afraid to let people into his heart." In her story Santa is walking along an icy street when he first glimpses the future Mrs. Claus, who is sobbing: "I have no friends at all. My parents don't even care."

Although their heads may tell them otherwise, children's hearts often yearn for even the worst of parents.

"Most of the kids missed their parents. It is hard not to be with your parents," recalled J. Brendan Tiernan-Lang, 34, a 1979 graduate of Boys Town who lives in Papillion, Neb.

"Christmas (was) always horrible, and I still don't enjoy the holidays as much as other people. I look at my wife, and I don't have the same joy," said Tiernan-Lang, who nonetheless thinks Boys Town was preferable to continuing to live with his own family, which he says abused him.

Until this fall, orphanages had pretty much faded from public perception to mere settings for pre-Technicolor Hollywood movies and 19th Century Dickensian novels like "Oliver Twist."

Gingrich's current proposal to fund orphanages in lieu of welfare payments to teenage mothers comes at a time when even administrators of the approximately 2,000 modern orphanages are wary of the word, preferring euphemistic terms like "group homes" or "residential treatment centers."

Even for the orphaned and the poorest of children, placements in such institutions are a rarity. The 66,500 children living in such facilities in 1990 represented a tiny fraction of the 7.8 million children on public assistance at the time, according to the American Public Welfare Association.

Group homes essentially have turned into a last resort for the most troubled and traumatized youths, who now make up the bulk of those entering Boys Town.

They are youngsters like the 12-year-old boy who, said one Boys Town administrator, was "beaten to a pulp" by his father when he dropped a flashlight during a Thanksgiving visit home. More than half have been sexually abused. Nearly 180 of the children have drinking problems that put them in Alcoholics Anonymous. And many of the youths once slashed their wrists or popped pills when they gave up on life altogether.

Thirty-five percent of them attend college after graduating Boys Town.

Almost always, children end up in Boys Town, or any other institution, only after placements in a series of foster families have failed.

Social service workers hesitate to move children into institutions-and are quick to move them out-in part because of the cost. On average, care runs $36,000 per year for a child versus about $2,500 per year in support given through welfare and food stamp benefits, according to the Child Welfare League of America.

And, more importantly, no matter how homelike the setting, the administrators who run them acknowledge that their institutions never can replicate home.

"When I'm raising children in a congregate care setting, it's very difficult for me to be mother and father to all these children," said Tom Woll, executive director of Parmadale Family Services, a residential treatment center in Cleveland.